A Matter Of Perspective: Museum Of Simulation Technology

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Today’s winners for the Goodness That’s A Good Idea Award are a team of students from Carnegie Mellon University, Pillow Castle. They’ve built a tech demo – The Museum Of Simulation Technology – for a game concept in which forced perspective becomes a game mechanic. YES. A planet cries out, “Surely this could be Portal 3?!”, forgetting all the other times they’d shouted that over the last few years, forgetting the Valve doesn’t messy its hands making silly old games any more. Still, this is rather brilliant, and well worth a look.

The Kids In The Hall should be remembered for many, many great sketches. “My Pen!”, anything featuring the Chicken Lady, Sex Girl Patrol, Whole Lotta Milka, Sir Simon Milligan, Salty Ham, and on and on. But no, they’re only ever remembered for “I’m crushing your head”, misquoted, misattributed, and inevitably delivered with the hand aligned entirely wrongly. (“NO! That’s ‘I’m squeezing your face’ you IDIOT.”) But now, with this new tech, we finally can live out that sketch in gaming form. I’m not saying that’s what Pillow Castle have in mind. I’m saying it’s what Pillow Castle has to do, if they don’t want trouble.

There’s a whole lot of potential in there. Certainly it shares things in common with Steve Swink’s upcoming Scale, but this is still its own distinct thing, and it’s darned impressive. Can’t wait to see where this goes.

That is remarkable, exactly the same mechanic used in both.
What’s really fascinating to me is how Pillow Castle’s version is getting thrown around the internet, with cries for them to be instantly hired by Valve reverberating in the electro-halls. Despite being released a year earlier yours sits in comparative obscurity. Everyone that commented on the game and video loved your version, but somehow it never got into that magical series of internet events that bring widespread attention.
I don’t think it’s because of a difference in quality, especially as yours is actually playable and must surely be considered more innovative as it came out over a year earlier. I can only assume it’s a case of Pillow Castle’s video happening on to the screen of some influential news poster or twitterer. The result of careful public relations on Pillow Castle’s part, or just blind luck?

You call it a problem, the Bugbladder beast calls it macaroni. Anyway I do remember ‘a Tale of Scale’ being featured here on RPS back in its time ( link to rockpapershotgun.com ).
Unlike ‘A Matter Of Perspective’ though, it did not profile itself as a full length game and simply placed itself on equal footing with the other competition entrants.
The fact that it got picked out to get featured is already a big achievement in that light.

Well, I don’t mind much. A bit perhaps. ;-) I could have expanded “Tale of Scale” back then, and tried to market it more. But I am doing that right now with an even older Ludum Dare entry I did nearly 3 years ago (called “TRI” – link to ludumdare.com – new version here: http://www.tri-game.com), and after this one I probably won’t do another First-Person Puzzle Game for a long time, at least not as a full game. So I wish Pillow Castle best of luck!

@The Random One: Yeah, nowadays I would do something other than TRI, to be honest. But we never had the heart to abandon the project, so we want to finish it now. I think would rather do a better version of Wunderworld, if I had the choice. ;-)

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